I dunno - I don't get how it's tone deaf. If I were doing an entire new build, perhaps. Jumping to Zen4 is going to require new socket, new RAM, etc... a big investment. I don't know that I'd make that same investment in a AM4 / DDR4 setup right now.
But... there's an awful lot of folks rocking existing AM4 rigs. This, new Zen3 stuff will drop into many existing AM4 boards. Anyone back on Zen2 or earlier, these are still going to be a huge upgrade, and not require a full system swapout.
Will it beat out a Zen4 that comes out in 6-9 months? Probably not. Will Zen4 have availability issues at the onset like Zen3 had (remember, it took months to find them in stock, especially desirable SKUs, and it wasn't until recently that we actually saw prices start to come down)
These new CPUs may be a bit late to the game (would have been nice to have them 3-4 months ago, around the time or before Alder Lake came about. But I don't think putting them out now is tone deaf. I think it's advertising a lot of what makes AMD more attractive to a lot of people - your investment goes further, and it provides an upgrade path for folks without having to jump into a full new build, especially when AMD is going through it's first socket transition in a long time.
This is mostly AMD just going back and filling in the product gaps in their lineup, their low end especially has been ignored (for good reason, they were selling everything they could make on the high end) -- now that they are caught up they can go back and get those gaps filled in, generate a bit of news, and see if they can't upsell any folks still rocking AM4 before they jump to the next socket.
The only disappointment I see here are no non-Pro Zen3 TRs...
